EPredictor: An Experimental Platform for Community Evolution Prediction Tests

This paper presents "EPredictor" an experimental platform which enables testing, verifying and validating models related to community evolution prediction in dynamic social networks. Community evolution prediction is one of the most interesting issues in the field of social network analysis. It is usually handled by following four main steps: (1) split the network into timeframes; (2) detect communities in each timeframe; (3) track their evolutionary behavior and (4) build a predictive model to forecast the future events. The main objective of EPredictor is to provide a flexible environment that handles the entire process of community evolution prediction with a rich set of literature methods for each step; thus enabling researchers to make valuable comparisons and consistent analysis.